


Stalefish

by Amiril



Series: Amiril Fic (Not Cover Art) [5]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Extreme Sports, F/F, Getting Together, Nile Freeman centric, POV Nile Freeman, Social Media, Team Bonding, Team as Family, joe and nicky are very ride-or-die for each other even when it's inconvenient
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:00:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25315687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amiril/pseuds/Amiril
Summary: “Don’t look at it as a curse,” Joe had told her, a month earlier. “Think of it as an opportunity. What did you want to do that you were always too scared to try?”
Relationships: Andy & Joe & Nicky & Nile, Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Nile Freeman, background Joe | Yusuf/Nicky | Nicolo
Series: Amiril Fic (Not Cover Art) [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/827448
Comments: 108
Kudos: 1636
Collections: Social Media Fics





	Stalefish

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Polski available: [Stalefish](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26513668) by [tehanu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tehanu/pseuds/tehanu)



> inspired by [this tumblr post](https://lucygaybaird.tumblr.com/post/623736846331052032/i-totally-think-that-in-between-immortal-vigilante)

It’s six weeks before she breaks down and checks her Facebook page.

Five months ago, she’d changed her profile picture to the photo Jay had taken when she made corporal. In it, Nile beams in a blue Marines t-shirt. The bar behind her had a countertop covered in international coins and a bartender who flirted with Dizzy by showing her pictures of his pet turtle, but portrait mode has turned the background into a soft blur.

 _You were a beautiful soul, you made me smile so many times, and i’ll miss you terribly,_ writes someone Nile thinks she went to high school with.

 _Heartbroken & devastated, but I know you’re looking down on us from Heaven, _writes another.

There are dozens of comments about her sacrifice. Her patriotism. None of these people knew her well.

There is no comment from Dizzy.

Memphis posted a photo of the two of them from a childhood Christmas, nearly buried in a pile of wrapping paper. He captioned it with just _love you, sis,_ and Nile slams the laptop shut.

_He’ll be fine. He’ll be fine. He’ll be fine._

“Are you alright?” Nicky asks, lowering his book. He has a way of asking that makes it seem like he’s not pressing for more information, even when he clearly is.

“Yeah. I, uh.” Her instinct is to reach for a drink, but it’s only ten in the morning and all alcohol is being strictly regulated now because _you’re mortal, Andy, that means you could get liver failure._ “I made the mistake of checking my social media.”

His eyes widen. “And how was that?”

He doesn’t ask if she was foolish enough to log in, and she wonders if that was a gesture of trust, or if he’s going to check later.

“It was…” a bit like watching her own funeral. Did she _have_ a funeral? There was no body. They must have brought her mother a flag. There would have been a church service—Reverend Jackson probably led it. He’d been so kind to them, after her father died. Organized the community to bring them food, clothes, school supplies. Let Nile cry in the back room without being disturbed. When she kissed Aliya Monroe in the tenth grade, he’d been the one to tell her it was okay. That she was made in God’s image, and He would always love her.

She wonders what he would make of her now.

She wonders what _He_ makes of her now.

Nicky waits, endlessly patient, because he has learned to be endlessly patient, because they are endless. Desperate for air, Nile steps around his chair and out onto the balcony. The Romanian countryside spreads out before her: rolling green hills dotted with cities and villages that are older than Nicky and Joe, but younger than Andy. Full of castles and people that watch Nile carefully when she walks by.

Corporal Nile Freeman would never have stood here.

Corporal Nile Freeman is being mourned. And Nile—

* * *

“What’s the worst way you’ve ever died?” she asks Andy, late at night in a town overlooking the sea.

It’s a rude question. It’s invasive. The answer likely has to do with the two ghosts that walk in her footsteps. But she asks, because Andy will always understand. Every step of the way, Andy has understood.

“Hmm. Being drawn and quartered wasn’t a good time. I also do not recommend being keelhauled.”

Eugh. Nile shudders to think of it, and then shudders again when she remembers how many deaths she has ahead of her.

* * *

_What would you do,_ she and her friends used to ask each other, _if you didn’t have to work? What job would you take if the pay didn’t matter? Where would you go, if you could go anywhere in the world? What would you do with five million dollars? Ten million?_

They’d try to pick the most outrageous things they could: _I’d spend my time making intricate sweaters for mice. I’d become a Family Feud professional. I’d go to Tibet—no—Timbuktu—no—Wakanda—_ and then they’d get bogged down in the logistics of the question and whether only real places count.

The team goes to Somalia. To China. To Uruguay. They don’t take photos, but Joe draws Nicky planking at Machu Pichu (“Hey Nile, do the kids still do this?” “No. No they do not,”) and Nile at Skate Park Galit and Andy in Aksum. Andy drinking Joe’s coffee in Latvia. Andy perched in an olive tree with a pair of binoculars.

“Want something to remember me by?” she finally asks, as though there is no other reason someone would want to look at her while she does push-ups on a tile patio, the Greek sunlight highlighting each curve of her arms. A bead of sweat drips off her nose, and Nile wants to lick it.

“I just want to be able to tell how fast you are aging, Boss,” Joe says innocently. “I am doing an artistic study. Perhaps when you get your first wrinkle, we will throw a party.”

“I can still kill you, you know.”

“That is okay. Nicky will avenge me.”

“I will not,” says Nicky. “It’s almost time for the Italy-Brazil game. I will not miss it because you have picked a fight you cannot win.” His resolve lasts about five seconds under Joe’s wide, pleading eyes. “Fine. Yes. I will avenge, but only if we get started now.”

Six minutes later, Joe and Nicky are booing Neymar while their broken bones pop into place. They both seem in very high spirits over the whole thing, and Nile wonders if they’re trying to pretend nothing has changed, or if they’re relieved that nothing has. Andy has a scratch on one cheek, and she still shines.

“How about you?” she asks Nile, who is sitting under her umbrella, sipping a coke. “You’ve trained a lot since the plane. Would you like to give it another shot?”

Her shirt is just a little too small, stretched over her hips and breasts. 

Nile tilts her head to one side, considering.

* * *

“Don’t look at it as a curse,” Joe had told her, a month earlier. “Think of it as an opportunity. What did you want to do that you were always too scared to try?”

* * *

The coolest boy on her street had been Harriam Wilson, who skateboarded down the railing of the middle school steps and did a kickflip on the dismount. He did it perfectly every time Nile saw, except the last one.

“It’s a real shame about his arm,” Nile’s mother had said. “He’s going to have a hell of a time in school for the next few weeks.”

Nile buys the most expensive skateboard in Paris and takes it to the most ridiculous skate park she can find. This second part she does after dark, so that she won’t end up in the background of a Snapchat— or whatever the kids use now— and also in case she cracks her head open and dies.

“And so that the children won’t show you up,” Andy says. She’s sitting with her legs dangling over one of the ramps, working her way through a box of chocolates that Nile is fairly certain had been a Valentine’s Day present from Nicky to Joe.

“Did I ask?”

“No. But I call it like I see it.”

“Do you.” Conscious of Andy’s gaze, Nile hops on the skateboard. She probably should have chosen something less steep to start out with, and for a moment her brain won’t let her move. Instinct keeps her back where it’s safe, and it’s an instinct she has to get over.

Even if she falls, it’ll only hurt for a moment.

She’s died four times already. Scraped knees and broken limbs are nothing compared to the leap from Merrick’s penthouse.

She rolls forwards.

Down the ramp, up the other side, and she’s flying.

* * *

“Is that a challenge?” Andy leans forward, feet apart, elbows on her knees.

Nile mirrors the pose. “If that’s what you think.”

“You really want to challenge me?”

“I do.” She pauses. “Puny mortal.”

Nicky and Joe _oooooh_ like someone has just been called to the principal’s office, and Andy cracks her knuckles.

“Alright then,” she says. “In that case, I’m buying a hotel for Boardwalk.”

* * *

She looks for steeper and steeper drops. She rides down railings until she gets bored, and eventually jumps over the railings to hit the floor below. She breaks twelve bones and when she stops landing on her ass, she switches to base jumping.

“We’ll go with you,” Joe announces. “It will be fun.”

The four of them hold hands and scream all the way down.

* * *

“Does it ever make you angry?” she asks. “When people look at you like that?”

Joe finishes rolling the joint, seemingly oblivious of the disapproving couple near the canal. “No,” he says. “What would be the point? In a few years, they will be dead. They will turn into dust in the ground and be forgotten and I will still be here. Why should anything they think matter to me? Someday this city will be dirt and this planet shall change beyond all recognition until nothing but a whisper of their belief remains, and when that day comes, I will have Nicky, and I will have you, and I will have Booker. And you will have them, and you will have me.”

The thought makes Nile feel like she’s falling from some great height: the swooping in her stomach, the thrill of motion, made more intense by the looming crash and her inevitable recovery.

“Do you think we’ll all live as long as Andy?”

He shrugs, blowing a smoke ring. She’s never seen someone actually do that before. “We don’t know. Nicky would tell you that it is the not knowing that keeps us human.”

“And what would you say?” Nile accepts the joint when he passes it over, trying not to think about the last time she smoked.

“I say, if there is no mystery, then life is not nearly so interesting.” 

* * *

She finds a tacky magnet in a souvenir shop and thinks, _Jay would love this._

Her cousin posts a picture of a newborn baby wrapped in a flamingo swaddle. A letterboard next to the crib says that she weighs six pounds and her name is Nilah.

Memphis graduates from college.

Andy fumbles the spatula, and the pancake she’d been flipping lands half on the pan, half on the stovetop.

Nile says, “when are you going to teach me how to fight with a hatchet?” 

“It’s not a _hatchet._ It’s a labrys.”

“Yeah.” Nile waits until Andy’s looking at her. They’re in Montevideo, the sun is still only thinking about rising, Frank Ocean’s voice is coming from her portable speaker, and she wonders how long it will be until she forgets this moment. “I know what it’s called.”

* * *

She drives a motorcycle off a cliff. She does not stick the landing.

She bleeds out on the ground, and she’s never felt more alive.

* * *

The metal of the car is warm against her back, even though the sun set hours ago. Around them, the desert is alive, lit by the faint light of the stars.

“The Incas saw dark constellations in the Milky Way,” Nile says. “There was a shepherd, a llama… a serpent. I don’t remember their names. I always thought that was neat: constellations where the stars _aren’t.”_ She turns her head slightly so she can see where Andy is lying next to her. The suspension creaks under their joined weight. “I guess you might know that. You probably spent time there.”

“I did. But I didn’t spend much of it stargazing.”

“What did you do?”

“I was with Quynh and Lykon. There was a war. Like always.”

“Come on,” Nile says. “You’ve got a secret cave full of dope-ass art. You can’t tell me you were _always_ fighting.”

Andy smiles at that. “No,” she says. “Not always.”

* * *

She kisses Andy for the first time on a patio in Greece.

Andy kisses her for the first time on a car in the desert.

* * *

She prints all the family photos on her phone, wraps them in plastic, and leaves them in Andy’s cave.

She throws the phone into the trash and herself out of an airplane, clinging to Joe and Nicky’s hands. 

_Nile is dead,_ she thinks, later, one hand in Andy’s hair.

_Long live Nile._

**Author's Note:**

> More stanning of Nile Freeman on Tumblr


End file.
